By Vitor Soares – Serial entrepreneur and Head of Product & Growth at Tips4y
New ideas rarely come on schedule. Sometimes it starts between workout sets.
One Saturday morning, while training in my home gym (if we can call it that), I asked myself a simple question: “What if I used these breaks to create something entirely from scratch using AI?”
Two hours later, I published the first episode of Fundadores – an experimental podcast inspired by Founders (by David Senra), but focused on Portuguese-related founders and their stories.
By the way, if you haven’t listened to it yet, I can’t recommend it enough: Founders is one of the most insightful shows ever created about entrepreneurship. Senra dives deep into the lives and mindsets of history’s greatest builders, from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney, extracting timeless lessons about ambition, discipline, and curiosity!
Why I did it
In my work leading product and growth, I constantly explore how fast ideas can move from concept to execution. Building reasonable software is now easy. Building something meaningful still requires curiosity and perhaps courage.
This podcast started as an experiment – to see how AI could co-create storytelling while letting me learn from the mindset of great entrepreneurs.
The minimalist AI stack
The production setup was intentionally simple:
- ChatGPT – to research the sources, outline the script, and clarify narrative gaps.
- NotebookLM – to process biographies, interviews, and articles, generating the audio narrative.
- Sora – to come up with the podcast’s visual identity in minutes.
- Spotify for Podcasters – for instant distribution (no AI here, as far as I recall).
No studio. No editing crew. Just curiosity, iteration, and an open mind.
From Gulbenkian to Alfredo da Silva: four founders, four lessons (so far)
Each episode became a small case study in experimentation and learning:
- Calouste Gulbenkian – testing whether AI could produce a coherent, well-paced story that maybe some people would enjoy listening too.
- António Champalimaud – integrating listener feedback to add practical insights for founders.
- Salvador Caetano – discovering that shorter prompts create more natural-sounding results. At least it appeared like that to me.
- Alfredo da Silva – getting into cruise mode: prompted ChatGpt between Friday and Saturday morning when I had short time slots available, so each new episode doesn’t consume more than 60 minutes of my time, everything combined.
Every weekend, I refine the process a little more – just like a founder iterating toward product-market fit.
For example, I began using NotebookLM’s Deep Dive mode because it created a natural dialogue between two virtual hosts. It felt closer to the conversational rhythm of real podcasts, allowing deeper exploration of a founder’s life and decisions.
Part of the conversation with my assistant ChatGPT about NotebookLM audio mode
Later, I considered testing the Brief and Debate modes, but time constraints and tonal inconsistencies made me stick with Deep Dive as the most coherent option.
And like any creative process, mistakes happen. In one episode, NotebookLM audio generator confused modern developments at Grupo Salvador Caetano with events from the founder’s lifetime. Instead of deleting it, I used it as a teachable moment, updating the episode description with an errata and clarifying who leads the group today.
Each of these iterations – tool selection, structure, distribution, or correction – became a micro-experiment in building with AI.
Scaling creativity through systems
As the process matured, I realized I was repeating similar tasks every weekend: defining the structure, identifying sources, and rewriting the episode summaries. So, I created a dedicated ChatGPT project (see below) to automate part of that workflow.
This setup helps ChatGPT instantly recall the style, objectives, and previous tone of Fundadores. Instead of starting from zero each time, it now suggests sources, outlines, and narrative hooks consistent with earlier episodes.
In other words, I went from prompting AI to building with AI.
What used to take an hour to structure now takes minutes – letting me spend more time refining the story rather than rebuilding the process.
In just a few weeks, Fundadores surpassed 90 plays and seven listening hours on Spotify, plus Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Modest numbers, but meaningful for a project built between gym sets – and driven by curiosity over metrics.
What founders can take away
- Start before it’s perfect – progress beats polish.
- Use feedback as data – iteration compounds faster than planning.
- Learn from others’ playbooks – every founder story hides patterns worth reapplying.
- Let AI accelerate, not replace – technology amplifies execution, not intent.
The real lesson
Fundadores isn’t about perfection – it’s about experimentation.
And the experiment isn’t stopping at audio. I’m currently building a website for Fundadores, entirely generated through ChatGPT’s Agent Mode – a new test of how far end-to-end automation can go with quality.
Even if Fundadores never tops the charts, it’s already a success. Because success, in this context, means creating, learning, and sharing – three things every founder should practice more often.
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🎧 Listen to Fundadores:
About the author:
Vitor Soares currently serves as Head of Product & Growth at Tips4y, a leading IT company that delivers digital solutions to major players in the automotive sector. He has led multiple startups, including Tap My Back, an employee recognition and feedback platform acquired by a Texas-based company in 2023. He specializes in building marketplaces, SaaS products, and AI-driven solutions. Vítor also mentors zero-to-one founders on MentorCruise.
Featured image: Vitor Soares, a serial entrepreneur and Head of Product & Growth at Tips4y (Photo courtesy of Vitor Soares)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in contributed opinion pieces are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Portugal Startup News.
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